Wednesday, April 09, 2008

Heavy Mental 7# - 'Slovak Attack'

Straight out of work and up to Fleda for another installment of Heavy Mental. I am very happy to have found out that the event was happening at all as it was only the evening before that I first saw the advertisement.

The flip side of the flyer made for very interesting reading (not just because I have to struggle reading Czech). As is quite popular on many flyers these days the names of the bands are listed and below each is a link to their myspace account and also a few words to describe their sound.

Pjoni (electronica/breakcore/lofi)



Voice Over Noise (live electronic impro sound)



Jack Jack (no-input mixing board sound)



Batcha De Mental (electro/dubstep/offstep)



In particular I liked 'offstep', which I had never heard of before. I could google this to see if it's a commonly used name for a genre or if Batcha invented it himself, but I prefer not to know and simply enjoy wondering about it.

Sadly you can't see with great detail from my video clips, but the team of VJs (VJS GND, LIU, P.O.P.CORP. a PITCH.THE.GLITCH) did a pretty amazing job of streaming constantly evolving moving images to accompany the sounds; no repeating loops like I do instead, they had their live feed or loop constantly twitching and glitching with what looked like the equivilent of visual granular synthesis (it's probably time for me to become more familiar with Max/MSP + Jitter).

The evening was full of loud and incredibly challenging and diverse sound. I guess that many people would contest that it was music. I found it really exciting and felt that theoretically, anything was possible afterwards.

I posted my remix of Jamie Lidell's 'Feel Good' (BEW remix) on myspace yesterday before going to work. After the Heavy Mental event i feel it's a bit tame. Go have a listen for yourself and judge.

Note to self: must figure out how to stop spam-bots in the comments section.

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2 Comments:

Anonymous Anonymous said...

Yeah. Nice report. Thanx! See you next time!

7:53 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

Thanks for your report. The visualisations were in fact done in the pure data software, with some custom plugins and videos encoded with broken encoders. The second, more ambient part of visuals, was created in the vvvv software. We did some mixing of both on an old-school videomixer, but due to its age, we had to manipulate it really carefully, to prevent a image flickering.

cheers, popcorp

10:29 PM  

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